MONSTER MAGNET La Locomotive - Paris, France
December 2, 2008

My first Monster Magnet concert!
This is a band I discovered long ago but I only got the chance to see them on this December 2008 night.

There were four concerts in Paris that night: Airbourne was playing at the Trabendo, Moonspell and Cradle Of Filth at the Bataclan, Adam Bomb in Cergy (some 20 minutes away from Paris) and Monster Magnet at the Locomotive.

This was a hard choice to make and most of my friends got to see Airbourne. I picked up Monster Magnet because it was the only band I had never seen, and a lot of people told me that they were great on stage.

The venue was well filled, although the show was not sold out.
There were two opening acts. I missed the first one but I saw the whole Nebula show.

The first thing to notice was the sound. It was really loud, so you know you’re in for a pure Rock n’Roll night.

Monster Magnet were promoting their latest record 4 Way Diablo.
To my surprise, there were five musicians on stage: Phil Caivano, the previous guitarist is back on the band. He didn’t play in 4 Way Diablo but he was making the tour.

As Dave Wyndorf doesn’t play guitar in every song, it was great to have two guitar players all the time: Phil Caivano and Ed Mundell.

Bass player Jim Bagliano was unchained, moving everywhere and making believe that he was going to throw his bass to the audience.

Dave Wyndorf sings great, I love his voice, and when he sings he’s very theatrical.
But he was not dressed like the biker, as he used to.
Instead, he had a black t-shirt and a sweater, almost a “grunge” attitude, or even a Sunday afternoon fashion.

He has also almost doubled in volume since the last video clips I saw. I guess he had a lot of hamburgers on the last few years…
Anyway, as long as the music and the performance are good, this doesn’t really matter.

Lights weren’t that great, but the band had a giant screen as a background, displaying different kind of images, mostly old-fashioned cartoons.

Sometimes it was quite psychedelic, and went very good with the music played.

My favourite Monster Magnet song is Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and they did a great version.

I also enjoyed Powertrip, Spacelorld, as well as Tractor and the long Spine Of God version which were played at the encores.

But there was something weird about the setlist:
There wasn’t any song from 4 Way Diablo, the latest record and the one they were supposed to promote…

Quite strange, but anyway the show was very good.

It was my first time seeing Monster Magnet, but I spoke to some people who had seen them before and they liked it very much too.

What a way to start a rock n’roll week: Adam Bomb on Monday and Monster Magnet on Tuesday! That’s really OK to me!